HP Pavilion 500 will not boot

[Doug5257]

Tried a system reset. Lost everything.  Will not boot.  Back up I made will not boot up.  Tried to boot from my Compaq Pro 6300, and it booted, but a little over half way through restore it errored. Is there any way to get a system program for an older computer?

[WAWood]

@Doug5257 

<Sigh>  Every time I read one of these Factory-Reset-Failed posts I cringe and continue to wonder why everyone seems to think a factory reset is a miracle cure when, in many cases, it only serves to make things worse!

If the PC is really SLOW, a factory reset will do NOTHING to fix that, and will most likely fail -- leaving you with an unusable PC. If a factory rest starts out OK and then halts part way through, that is nearly always an indication of a failing drive -- which is a hardware issue that a factory reset will do nothing to fix.

To check for hard drive failing, if your PC is new enough to support UEFI, you can use these steps to test the hard drive: http://support.hp.com/us-en/document/c00439024

If not, you have to follow these steps:
1) Press Esc key repeatedly, several times a second, while rebooting the laptop. Do NOT hold the key down, just press it over and over.
2) Eventually, you will see an HP Startup Menu
3) press the Function key for testing the hard drive (usually F2) and let it run.

Also, It sounds like the Pavilion 500 will not boot, so you are trying to use recovery media for a Compaq to fix that -- and that will NOT work because the media is model-specific.

And no, yo\u can't get the OS files you need from a different PC.

So how new is the Pavilion and what OS version was running on it?

Also, there are ways to recover personal data if the drive is not completely dead.   If that is your goal here, then you need to tell us that.